


Base

by bunnoculars



Category: SHINee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 03:44:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14072163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: Jonghyun goes solo.





	Base

**Author's Note:**

> Listened to _Base_ a lot while writing this. I tend to overlook it for Jonghyun's LP's, so I forgot just how good it is. Which, it is really, really good. I also watched Jonghyun perform "Deja-Boo" several hundred times, purely for research purposes.

He’s not alone.

“Jonghyun-ah. Jonghyun-ah!”

There’s someone here with him. It’s not Taemin. He knows that for sure. He has no Taemin and he can’t forget. The world won’t let him forget. Even soju won’t let him forget.

“Hey, do you even know who you are? What’s your name?”

He knows that, too. It’s automatic. “Bling bling is Jonghyun.”

He doesn’t know the rest. Why he’s here. Where here is. Any of it. It’s scary, what if they ask that next. He can’t lie. Taemin says he sucks at it. He’s lied to Taemin before, though, lots. He’s going to lie, he’ll do it because he has to.

“One bottle, you’re such a,” something something. Something something, “Taxi. Wait here, okay, Jonghyunnie, stay right here.”

His chance, he can escape. He’s alone again. He’s always alone. He can’t move, but he does. It hurts.

They come back.

“Taeminnie,” he says, as loud as he can. 

It’s all he has left. It doesn’t do any good. Still not Taemin.

There are more of them this time, and the world flips on its side again. And then he’s back down to one person. Same as before.

His face is wet.

“Hey, come on, stop it. This is so dumb. You’re supposed to be celebrating, you’re supposed to be happy, remember? You said today was the most important day of your life.”

 

Jonghyun wakes up.

Daylight pours in on him, no mercy. He can hide under his blanket, and he does, but his head is still a problem. The main problem. His skull is shrinking in on the thing that used to be his brain. His ears and eyes let everything in without asking him first, but he just makes it worse when he buries his face in the mattress and holds his head in his hands so that all he can hear are the sounds of his own body.

He shouldn’t be allowed to drink. No, it’s the other way around, drinking should be outlawed. Soju is a cancer. All it does is take things from people—time, self-respect, sanity—and it gives nothing back.

So that’s one thing. But who did this to him?

Jonghyun can’t remember on his own. He fights with himself for several long minutes, but he can’t stop himself from trying to think, and that’s worse than what’s out there, so he gives up. Crawls out into the open.

Glasses, then phone. No glasses. He really needs to change his contacts. This is their third, maybe fourth day, and his eyes itch.

Phone.

He has like five billion notifications that he’s just going to ignore. He really hopes he didn’t go on an SNS spree last night, he doesn’t know if he can handle that right now. The last time he did that…

It’s better not to think about it. It’s just, he feels like he’s trying to clean up someone else’s mess, some crazy person who pickled his body and probably said and did all kinds of weird stuff and then left him like this. Stressed out and exhausted before he’s even gotten out of bed.

He tries Nine first. Blue Night is the last sure thing before points unknown, and she could probably tell him where he went afterwards. She probably went with him. She’s asked him if he wants to have a drink with her a couple times and he’s always managed to avoid it. Maybe his luck ran out last night.

Looks like it.

There are two messages, one from Nine asking him if he got home okay, and then his own reply.

_thanks for taking such good care of me heeyeon-ssi <3_

“Oh my God,” Jonghyun moans, covering his face with his pillow and shutting the world out again.

His sister, definitely.

How can he say anything to her, though, when she probably had to drag him up here without waking up their mom. She didn’t get his blinds, but she emptied his pockets and took his shoes and socks and belt off and rolled him onto his side and covered him up, too. And he’d rather stick with that version of events, rather believe she did everything on her own, that she could get him up the stairs by herself when she’s so tiny, that when she got him inside, he didn’t make so much noise that his mom couldn’t sleep through it, when the slightest thing wakes her up…

He sucks. He sucks so, so much.

He gives himself a few minutes to hate himself in peace, and then emerges again. He’ll make them dinner later. Chili crab, or something. When he’s ready to get up, he’ll look up the recipe and go out and buy what he needs. He has plenty of time, nothing but time when he only works between twelve and two a.m. these days.

Plenty of time before he has to face Nine. _Heeyeon-ssi._ She’s seven years older than him, but he’s not interested in calling his friends noona. She told him to call her noona or Nine, so she’s Nine. 

Whatever, she has to know it wasn’t him. And she can’t be mad at him anyway, she got him drunk, so it’s her fault, so there.

He changes his password and moves on to better things. Taemin texted him. Taemin never texts him.

He kind of hopes he didn’t have a busy night as Taemin’s fan club president, but whatever. Taemin never really responds to that stuff anyway. Maybe he thinks Jonghyun doesn’t take him seriously. Maybe he’s scared that Jonghyun is being serious.

The first one is from two hours ago:

_u did it!! ur the best hyung!!!!!_

And then like twenty minutes after that one:

_buy me food ^^_

And Jonghyun doesn’t need to scroll up, doesn’t need to see his own storm of typos and emojis and exclamation points and cut off sentences, for everything to come back to him, so sudden and complete it feels like the last twenty minutes never happened.

His head can hurt all it wants. The sun can shine all it wants. His sister can embarrass him all she wants. He’s completely lame, a lightweight and a burden to everybody around him, and he does not care. He can take all of that.

Today is a good day. Yesterday was better, and Taemin’s replies are twelve hours late, and Jonghyun wanted them yesterday, and he wanted Taemin yesterday, too, but today is good.

He taps out a response, then waits again. Only five minutes this time.

 

Yesterday was the first day of Jonghyun’s future. It was the day his first album came into the world.

Mini album. Whatever.

He’s known for a while now that he’d be able to go solo at some point. And he’s always known there would be a problem, too: solo means something different to the company than it does to him. To them, it means more of Shinee’s Jonghyun, more Shinee, more money. To Jonghyun, it means doing his own thing. His own ideas, his own music, his own voice. He can’t have it any other way.

Jonghyun’s first ambition was to be a Korean language teacher. He’s always liked words. Then he failed his midterms, and got over it. Next he joined a band. He’s always liked to sing. They already had a singer, so he played bass. SM saw him at a gig and liked his face and told him to come audition. He came and auditioned for three months straight, and the day he finally made it, they pulled aside the curtain and played his voice back to him. And for the first time in his life, he had something real. Something he could do.

He took that and he trained eight hours a day for three years, he dropped out of high school to study music, he gave up his friends and broke up with his girlfriend and stopped talking to his father and stopped sleeping, and then finally, finally, he debuted. That was the best day of his life up till now. The best thing, the first and last thing, Jonghyun set out to do, and then _did._

It’s been six years now.

Jonghyun has taken too long to catch up, to realize that he’s been living his life blindly, no thought beyond getting to the next schedule, the next day, the next song, and now that he’s finally started thinking again, he can’t stop. About what he expects of himself, about what he’d do if he had more control, what honesty would look like from his point of view. He does nothing but think now.

Anyway. When SM came to him this past June, he was ready. They laid out their plans for him, and for the first time in forever, Jonghyun said no.

Okay, not quite. Just told them that if they wanted more Shinee, he’d be willing to do a subunit. But he wouldn’t put his name on it. They said they would think about it, and he got their answer when Taemin told Jonghyun the company had offered Taemin his own album, not sure if he should even be happy for himself.

Jonghyun got happy enough for both of them. He told Taemin he was proud of him, told him again and again and again until Taemin finally believed him, stopped thinking of Jonghyun and finally started thinking of himself, and then Jonghyun wrote him a song and showed him off on Blue Night and outed himself as Taemin’s number one fan. And somehow all that happened already. Somehow Taemin has put _Ace_ behind him, already.

And then two weeks ago, Jonghyun and SM talked again. Same conversation. And he thought he was fine having that conversation until kingdom come. At least until he figured out how to convince them that he knows what he’s doing.

But yesterday, he got the call.

“We’ll try things your way going forward. You make the album you want.”

And lots of stuff happened. He kept it in until they hung up and then Jonghyun lost it. He cried his eyes out and forgot his mom was at work and called her and his mom cried, too, and that made him cry some more. Then he called Taemin like five times before he realized he was being sent straight to voicemail, and then he started texting him instead. And then he went to work because it was time to go to work and bragged to Nine and checked his phone every second he could. And then he went out to drink with her and forgot he had a phone.

 

Jonghyun doesn’t make his family chili crab. He’ll buy them a new apartment when he’s successful. Even if his album doesn’t do well, he will. They deserve that much.

He still showers and steals a can of Dawn 808 from his sister’s emergency stash and tries to make himself fit for human company, and then goes out and buys Taemin beef instead.

Taemin doesn’t make a big fuss, but Jonghyun never expected him to. It’s not about that. And anyway, he’s always let Jonghyun know other ways that Jonghyun’s happiness is his happiness too. Like tonight, Taemin watches Jonghyun talk and doesn’t say much, just smiles a lot, the kind of smile that warms his face and reaches his eyes and never really goes away. Drinks water with Jonghyun instead of alcohol. Traps his hands in his lap until Jonghyun decides the beef is cooked, lets Jonghyun feed him fat lettuce wraps when all he wants is the meat, even pretends to suffer the few times Jonghyun loads them up with garlic cloves and chili peppers, when Taemin is impervious to spicy food.

There were so many things going through Jonghyun’s head all afternoon, on the drive over even, but somehow he doesn’t need to say any of it now that Taemin is here. He does anyway, but that’s only because Taemin is trying so hard to listen to him and not miss anything the way he normally would. And then eventually, he just wants to hear Taemin’s voice.

So he changes direction. Says as casually as he can, “Give me some advice, Taemin-ah.”

Taemin’s face goes a little funny, like he doesn’t want to put any thought into it in case Jonghyun is fucking with him. “You want my advice?”

Jonghyun isn’t fucking with him, though, and he’s going to ignore all the reasons Taemin probably thinks that, because it’ll just hurt them both. Either Taemin dislikes himself enough that no one else is allowed to like him, or he doesn’t trust Jonghyun to know his own feelings. Jonghyun is just going to like Taemin more than Taemin likes himself, if that’s how it is.

“You’ve been through this whole process,” Jonghyun points out, even though he shouldn’t have to. It should be obvious. “Anything you learned by the end that you wish you’d known to start with? Taemin seonbaenim~?”

“But we’re different, hyung,” Taemin replies, like that should be obvious, too. “You don’t want to make the album I made. You fought this hard so you wouldn’t have to.”

And Taemin is right, but this keeps going wrong, a little bit at a time, and Jonghyun needs to fix it before it gets bad.

“We’re different people, sure. We’re not the same on the inside, so we can’t express ourselves in all the same ways.” Jonghyun gives him that much, then waits until Taemin can meet his eyes again and gives him a smile of his own, the stupid crazy one that always makes Taemin laugh at him. “But you’re going way over my head, Taeminnie. At the end of the day I still have to go to work and produce something, the same as you did. You don’t want to help me, is that it? You want me to make all the same mistakes you did?”

“I didn’t make any mistakes, though,” Taemin says, just to be contrary. And Taemin is pouting at him now, too, that’s good, that means he’s laughing at Jonghyun on the inside, but his face just twists Jonghyun’s chest tighter, no relief.

“Please, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says, kind of desperate for this part to be over while he still knows what he’s saying.

Taemin hides his smirk behind his fist. “I was Taemin seonbaenim earlier~”

“Fine. Taemin seonbaenim. Taemin seonsaengnim.”

That does it. Taemin gets control of his expression for about five seconds, and then he really does think it over, and his face gives him away again, pursed lips and crinkled eyes and furrowed brow. Taemin is one of the smartest people Jonghyun knows, but he’s also one of the dumbest. It’s cute. It’s so cute.

“Ummmm…then, I guess the most important thing is to figure out how to pick your battles?” Taemin says, like he’s having a hard time finding the right words. “Like, um. I gave in on a lot of big stuff this time because I thought the company knew better than me, but I regret it now. And then, I also gave people a hard time and got into a lot stupid fights over stuff that didn’t matter in the end, and I regret that, too. I think you have to organize your thoughts first, and maybe try saying them out loud, before you do anything.”

Jonghyun thinks it would be nice if he could make himself listen to Taemin, if he had Taemin there to tell him that every day maybe, but Taemin is worrying his lip and eyeing Jonghyun like he kind of wants to take it all back. 

“You don’t need to hear that from me, though. You already know what your music sounds like, and you know how to talk about it and make people want to listen to you, so you’ll be fine. You’ve come this far, now you just have to make an album that you like. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s enough if you really like it.”

Jonghyun knows what it cost Taemin to say that much, so he doesn’t press him for more, doesn’t try to catch Taemin’s eye, just tends to the grill and waits him out. After a while Taemin’s shoulders relax and then he darts in with his chopsticks and steals a few pieces of meat, chewing and chewing as his breathing slows. 

“And…I also think it’s important to remember that you can’t do it all yourself. You have to work with people, too, or the stress will be too much, and the results won’t be as good anyway,” Taemin goes on, before he fixes Jonghyun with a stern look. “Just, take care of yourself, okay? You’re not very good at that part, hyung.”

Jonghyun is so busy smiling he almost forgets to reply, and then he can’t stop himself, “Yes, seonbaenim~”

“That’s right, Jonghyun-ah. You should always listen to me,” Taemin replies, laying it on even thicker. Then the joke’s over and he’s just Taemin again, and he says, “If you don’t this time, you’re in trouble,” and Jonghyun goes hot all over.

It passes, and they go on to other things. They haven’t seen each other in a week, and going back further, it’s just been a few hours at a time, every few days. There’s so much Taemin Jonghyun needs to catch up on. Taemin tells him he had to get new glasses, like Jonghyun didn’t notice that right away, and he’s been sleeping ten hours a day, and he’s not sure if he should just chop his hair off so he can stop dying it black, or if he should be patient and keep growing his roots out. Jonghyun tells him he should bleach it again instead, that blond suits him better, just to see Taemin’s nose scrunch up.

And then, music. Taemin says he’s so excited for Bjork’s new album that he’s become obsessed with her old stuff all over again, and he’ll probably be burnt out by the time it comes out in January. He wants to know what Jonghyun has been listening to, but Jonghyun doesn’t have anything new to offer. He goes months in between discoveries and then has whole love affairs, the meeting, the honeymoon, the fights, the breakup, the forgetting. Right now he’s stuck on the part where he waits for it all to start again. Whenever this happened before, he used to listen to whatever Taemin listened to. Now it’s the folk music his mom turns on late at night and the pop his sister blasts when she gets ready to go out with her friends on weekends, whatever he hears on the radio. Red Velvet’s “Be Natural.”

Eventually Taemin asks him, “Hyung, don’t you have to go?”

“I still have time,” Jonghyun says, and he’s only kind of lying. It’s already half past ten, and it’ll take him thirty minutes he normally wouldn’t have to drive to MBC. He already prepared for tonight’s broadcast, though, did it this afternoon before the hangover medicine even kicked in. All he has to do is show up. “Why, do you have somewhere you have to be?”

Taemin says he doesn’t, and if they get any more meat they won’t be able to eat it, so Jonghyun hollers for more banchan instead, and then tries pretty hard to convince them both that he really wanted it, it’s not that he doesn’t want to get up.

And then his kimchi runs out again and the clock with it this time, and they step outside, and looking at Taemin in the moonlight, away from the smoke and grease, it hits Jonghyun all over again. How impossible Taemin is.

Maybe Taemin catches him staring, but he just smiles and goes in for another hug, and he’s warm and soft and smells like cinnamon, and Jonghyun can do this much. Letting go is a little harder, and looking at him again from this close is harder still.

“Are you going to listen tonight?” Jonghyun finds himself asking.

“Nope,” Taemin replies breezily, then returns the face Jonghyun makes with interest. “Why should I? You stopped giving me airtime when I stopped promoting.”

Jonghyun isn’t smiling. Not at all. “Then…I guess I won’t play ‘Danger’ after all~”

“’Ace,’” Taemin says immediately.

“What?”

“Do ‘Ace,’ I like it better.”

Jonghyun pretends to think it over. “We’ll see,” he says, not sure why his own voice floats away lighter than air, when it was so heavy inside his chest, and then that’s it.

He doesn’t know when the next time he’ll see Taemin will be. Hopefully soon, because he’s gone a minute or two without him and he’s already back to where he started. Waiting.

 

Jonghyun hasn’t dated anyone in a year and a half. He hasn’t had sex for about as long as that.

There are a lot of reasons he could give, if anyone ever asked, which no one ever would. All the members agreed a long time ago to protect each other’s privacy wherever they could help it, and anyway, Jonghyun has said he’s lonely a million times on Blue Night, and no one’s ever written in wanting to know what’s wrong with him. In fact half of the people that do write in have the same problem as him. And he’s long since stopped asking himself.

But the short answer is that he only wants to date Taemin, and he only wants to fuck Taemin. The long one is more complicated, but not by much.

When he first started having these feelings, he’d run away, but he could never go far, and the truth would always find him. He even began to break his own rules, went on blind dates, ruined friendships, said yes to girls who liked him way more than he liked them, but all that did was make him into a shitty boyfriend and probably a shitty person. He’d wake up next to someone and count the time until he could get out and go home to Taemin. Half the time he’d thought of nothing but Taemin the night before, too.

He tried cutting out the mornings, gave up on relationships and tried hookups instead, and when that just made it worse, he tried something else. Stopped lying to himself, stopped pretending there’s anything wrong with the way Taemin makes him feel, or that he would even change it if he could, and learned to be alone. All he has now is whatever Taemin can give him, which can seem like everything to Jonghyun on the good days, and nothing on the bad. For the rest of it he has his hand and the Taemin in his head.

And he was doing fine like that, until this past year. Last fall, Taemin moved out of their room and went back home, so Jonghyun did the same, and somehow he wasn’t prepared when the rules changed on him. Either they’re together as Shinee, or they never see each other, unless they run into each other in the places they still share, or one of them asks to meet first. He can’t get used to that, and now he’s started missing Taemin even when he’s with him.

It’s October again now. 2015 will be more of the same.

 

Within a week, Jonghyun is already letting Taemin down. First he stops eating, and then he stops sleeping, and then he stops dragging himself all the way home every single night. That means he pretty much stops showering for a while, too, until he goes three days in the same clothes and starts smelling himself and finally breaks. Goes back to the dorm instead.

The passcode has changed since the last time he’s been there, so he pounds on the door and yells for Manager Hyung. Minho comes instead.

“It’s three in the fucking morning,” Minho says by way of greeting, “and Manager Hyung isn’t around, so. Okay.”

And then he leaves him standing in the hallway, and Jonghyun has to get the door with his foot before it swings shut.

It takes another week for Jonghyun to realize that Manager Hyung is never around.

“He’s staying with his girlfriend until group activities pick up again,” Jingi tells him when he asks. “Making up for lost time, I guess?”

Must be nice.

Almost to the day SM made their decision to let him do what he wants, Jonghyun’s time has stopped being his own. Since then, Jonghyun has done nothing but listen to other people talk. He’s had a lot of meetings with a lot of people he already knows from the company, and that’s fine, because for the most part they want to go over things he needs someone else to figure out—setting him up with a creative team and sound engineers, booking studio time, putting a lock on the timeline they expect him to follow, from recording all the way to promotions, a million years crammed into four short months.

But they’ve also sat him down and taken him on endless tours of SM’s vaults, skimming through other people’s songs and throwing big names at him, and they’ve tried to set up meetings with songwriting teams that he kind of knows from their work with Shinee. And that’s one thing, but now that’s evolved into meetings with other teams that he doesn’t know, and then meetings with teams he’s never heard of, and then meetings. And more meetings. Because meetings. 

It’s almost like now that Jonghyun has started saying no, SM isn’t going to let him stop. They’re just going to keep finding things for him to say no to, until the word loses its thrill. Loses meaning. Turns into yes. And it’s already fucking with him. Like, maybe he really hasn’t gotten anywhere with them, maybe they think they’re going to manage his big rebellion down to nothing without him realizing.

For the moment he’s trying to ignore all that, until he figures out what he can use. They aren’t making it easy, though. Every day it’s the same thing: more options from them, more directions he can take his own ideas.

 

And in the meantime, he’s confirmed where everything starts for him.

“Deja-Boo.”

Jonghyun has been writing the same song over and over for two years, more or less, and “Deja-Boo” is the result. The end. He’s been sitting on it since the summer and hasn’t been able to touch it, not the words, not the music, nothing. He’s never gone so long before. And then, he’d played it for Taemin while they were in Japan last month, in his hotel room in Nagasaki. Taemin had danced to it, and maybe Jonghyun had kicked Taemin out as soon as the song ended so he wouldn’t do something crazy like kiss him, and maybe that’s when he knew.

But it’s only today that he’s decided that “Deja-Boo” is it.

“If you’re so sure, then why do I feel like you’re asking my opinion?”

Nine always comes back at him with stuff like that.

“SM is going to hate it,” Jonghyun admits.

Nine cracks a smile. “I guess your life is about to get harder.”

“So you like it?”

“What do you like about it?” Nine says, turning his own question on him.

Blue Night always puts him in the mood to talk, even on the days where he has nothing going on, nothing interesting to say, and Nine is always right there. They were already friends before Jonghyun invited her to do the program with him, but now he’s said all kinds of things to her he never would have otherwise. She’s good at making him think, too.

So Jonghyun spends the next segment with his song in the back of his head, even though he doesn’t need to think about it, even though “Deja-Boo” has been in his head and in his body so long that it feels weird trying to put it into words.

He likes the chilled out layers of vocals and sound he’s built up and torn down and slowly, slowly perfected over the years. He likes the funky bass line, likes the way it makes him want to move, the way it kind of turns him on. He wants to know what it would sound like if it weren’t just a demo on his phone. He likes the way the words feel in his mouth, likes what they do to his voice, and there’s the rap, too, he never gets to rap outside of noraebangs. And he likes the story, the way it has no ending or beginning. Plus the title, it was the final thing he added and he thinks it’s pretty cute.

The next time Jonghyun cuts to commercials, he barely waits for the ahjussi to start in on insurance policies before he’s saying, “I like that it’s mine.”

He’s so sure that’s the right answer, but Nine just laughs at him.

“What?” he demands, maybe a little hurt. Mostly he doesn’t get how that could be funny, unless he’s the joke.

“Nothing,” she says promptly, straight-faced, but her eyes are crinkled at the corners and he’s not going to trust her again. “I was just thinking that’s so you. You have such a particular way of looking at things, Jonghyun-ah.”

Jonghyun doesn’t know what to say to that. “Is there something wrong with the way I look at things?”

Nine studies him. They don’t have forever, but he tries to be patient.

“Do you really hate being an idol that much?” she says finally. “You don’t think the work you do with Shinee is yours?”

Jonghyun’s first thought is that maybe they’re having two separate conversations, but she’s probably just been picking up on the things he’s not saying. It’s not like he can ever really forget that she’s coming from a very different place than him, and just because she doesn’t look down on him for it, doesn’t mean he can forget that he’s heard it all before, either. Idols and indie musicians don’t usually coexist this peacefully. They usually aren’t friends. They usually don’t talk about music, because no one thinks idols can.

“I became an idol because I wanted to get into music, not because I wanted to be an idol. I didn’t know any better way,” Jonghyun says, and it’s the truth, but it tastes bad. And Nine is just trying to hear him out, but Jonghyun is starting to feel trapped. “And now I don’t know any other life. There’s no me without Shinee anymore.”

It’s just, he’s not sure if he can say anything without trying to justify himself, and he hates that he still gets like this when he knows better. Almost everybody at SM is like Jonghyun, they all like music, they’re all there for the music, but right now he’s thinking about Taemin. How hard he worked to train his voice, how quickly he picks up the things Jonghyun learned in music school, how he’s learned to express things with his body that Jonghyun can’t find words for. How he still puts himself down despite all that.

_You don’t want to make the album I made, hyung._

Even if he did want to, Jonghyun couldn’t make _Ace._ Or maybe it’s not that he couldn’t, just that it wouldn’t be any good coming from him. It wouldn’t mean anything. The reason Taemin is so beautiful is because he’s the exact same on the inside as he is on the outside. There’s no difference between the idol the world gets to see and the person Jonghyun knows, and Jonghyun knows everything about him. Taemin makes Jonghyun want to believe in all the things that have made his own life hell. 

“I don’t know if my personality or my image is the problem,” Jonghyun finds himself saying. “Like, there’s Shinee’s Jonghyun, and then there’s the Jonghyun I have to live with every day, and I’m trying not to hate either of them. If I don’t do what I want this time I’ll hate them both.”

Nine’s brow furrows. “How are you the third person in all this? Does that make any sense?”

And Jonghyun has had it with her fucking with him and making him talk and then fixating on the weirdest parts out of everything he’s said.

“Why do you always say the wrong thing?” he demands.

“Sorry, it’s not that I don’t understand you,” Nine says easily, and he can’t stay mad at her. “But, Jonghyun-ah.”

“What now?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to say this…”

She combs her hair away from her face like she’s gathering it back into a ponytail, and for a second Jonghyun wishes his own hair were long enough to try it. His sister used to do it to him when he was little.

And then Nine goes for it. Says, “Just, it doesn’t have to be either-or. You’re a singer. You can make other people’s music your own, and all you need is your voice. And you’ve also written songs for other people. Good songs, songs you like.”

“That’s different,” Jonghyun says a little too quickly. “I’m trying to say what _I_ want to say this time.”

“And I respect that,” Nine replies, and maybe he’s frustrating her. Maybe he’s the one who’s being difficult now. “I’m just trying to tell you that there’s more than one way to do that. There are ways you can say things with Shinee, too.” She lets her words sink in a little, before she slots him a glance over her script and says almost gently, “I like the third Jonghyun best, the one in the middle. I think he’s the one I get to see every day.”

“I don’t know why I talk to you, Nine-ssi,” Jonghyun says, but he’s smiling. He doesn’t know how or why but she got him to smile. They only have a minute or two left now before they’re back on air. “But you like the song? ‘Deja-Boo?’”

Nine nods. “Yes, I like it.”

“You never said,” Jonghyun says.

“I like it,” she says again. “I can’t decide if it’s cute or sexy, and I like that.”

Jonghyun ignores the lightness in his chest to favor her with a smirk, the one that he’s perfected over the years. “I can do both.”

 

Jonghyun is wrong, kind of. There’s no standoff.

SM lets him have “Deja-Boo.” In exchange, he takes their surefire R&B hit cooked up in a lab in Scandinavia, names it “Crazy,” rattles off some sexy lyrics and tries to make it his baby. The fight will definitely come later, when they have to decide which song to promote, and he’s not confident he can win that one, but he texts Taemin to brag anyway. 

When he gets out of the shower and goes into their room that night, he finds the response.

_thats the song u showed me right_

He doesn’t want to deal with that. He lies in his bed and doesn’t deal with it and eventually turns to face the wall so he doesn’t have to deal with Taemin’s empty bed, either, and then he gives up. Replies with specifics he thinks any normal person would remember. Turns his phone off.

It’s not much longer before he gets up, gets dressed. He figures he’ll get a janitor to let him in and spend the night with his album in one of the practice rooms.

On his way out he runs into Minho, and he doesn’t know how it happens, but he ends up playing Fifa with him until dawn instead. He even manages to beat Minho once, and Minho doesn’t even get mad. Jingi sleeps through it, and somehow the sun still comes up.

That happens more than once.

And then other times Jonghyun will come back from Blue Night at ass o’clock, and Minho will want to get takeout, and Jonghyun is always too tired to stop him. Jingi only comes out of his room to join them when they order chicken. Jonghyun doesn’t know what he does in there all day, and neither does Minho when he asks him. Somehow he can’t remember if Jingi was like this when all five of them were living here, before this summer and his throat surgery.

 

The remainder of the album slowly falls into place.

Jonghyun has to fight a lot harder for the rest of his compositions, and in the end he only manages to conquer half the track list. The first time he pitches one of his songs and the creative team flat-out rejects it, it’s like a bomb goes off inside him, but he gets used to the rage and the humiliation after a while. Pretty soon it’s nothing to him at all, if he still sees a way forward. He argues “Neon’s” case every time they meet for ten days straight, before he learns to be a little more flexible, and sneaks another one of his songs in as a bonus track for the physical album.

His lyrics are another story. The company has no problem with him writing everything himself, as long as he submits everything to them ahead of time, the way he’s always had to when he writes for Shinee. That still rankles, but he’s never been interested in being obvious, anyway, so he’s not going to waste energy getting angry about censorship that’s never going to happen.

Not everything is set in stone when he finally leaves the hell of preproduction and goes into recording, but he has more than enough to work with, and his schedule takes shape pretty fast as SM green lights his dream collaborations one by one. And maybe SM has some lingering doubts, a few more hoops lined up for him to jump through, and maybe they’re already skipping ahead to the part where they decide what his music looks like, but Jonghyun is past caring about that stuff. He has his album in his head now. He’ll go crazy if he doesn’t get it out, whatever it takes.

Time starts to fly away from him before he even knows what’s happening, and he does everything he can to compensate, buys the whole staff lunch way more often than he can probably afford so that they’ll eat in the control room and let him work through his break, stretches his hours as much as possible, so he can get to work by six or seven and get out at ten or eleven, charms phone numbers and emails out of the engineers and tries not to send them any of his thoughts after twelve. He’s pretty sure everyone working with him is going to hate his album by the end, and they probably already hate him, but he can’t help it.

Pretty soon Jonghyun stops functioning outside of the studio, but that’s okay. Nine covers for him at Blue Night and if he can get an hour or two of sleep a day he won’t start blacking out, won’t lose any more time.

Because right now, recording is all that matters. This is the part he knows how to do. The part he actually wants to do.

He just has to get it right. He has to get everything right.

 

This time Minho lets Jonghyun choose between jjampong and jjajangmyun. When Jonghyun chooses sleep, Minho doesn’t listen to him, and eats what he wants of both, snatching glances at Jonghyun like he’s supposed to get jealous or something. Whatever. Jonghyun is down to an hour every other night, and this is an off day, so he puts up with it.

“It’s so lonely here now,” Minho says suddenly, and Jonghyun isn’t going to think about why that strikes a chord in his chest, when the words reach him mixed with bits of half-chewed noodle.

Minho doesn’t apologize, just throws a napkin at Jonghyun, and Jonghyun doesn’t care enough to use it as an excuse to escape into the shower, either.

Minho tries again after he swallows. “I miss the days we shared one room sometimes.”

“I don’t,” Jonghyun says, because he still remembers how it really was, and anyway, Minho never seems to get that nostalgia is supposed to be sad. And then he lies, says, “I like being alone.”

“Like you’re alone at home,” Minho scoffs, and maybe he’s right, but that doesn’t mean Jonghyun has to like it. And then Minho stops, jabs his chopsticks in Jonghyun’s face like he’s forgotten he’s holding them. “Speaking of which, your mom stopped by. You were out, so we talked for a while and she left some food.”

His mom has always liked Minho the best, she has bad taste in men. His sister is better. She’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that her bias is Jonghyun, if only to embarrass him.

“I’m always out,” Jonghyun says, and Minho will probably take that to mean thank you, which means Jonghyun doesn’t need to go that far. And then he thinks about it a little. “What kind of food, how much did she bring?”

“I don’t know. This was weeks ago, I forgot till now. And you weren’t there so she said I could eat all of it~”

“No it wasn’t, and no she didn’t,” Jonghyun rattles off quickly, and goes over to the fridge to confirm. His heart hurts a little, looking at the stack of flimsy hot pink tupperware. She uses it for everything at home too so she won’t have to wash dishes. The feeling crawls up his throat as he shuttles them over to the table and snaps the first one open, and he can barely get anything down.

In the meantime, Minho finds something new to talk about. “Did you see Kibummie’s musical is reopening next month?”

“He texted me, yeah.”

“Do you have time to visit him this time, do you want to go together?”

Jonghyun hesitates. He knows he can’t say yes, but it sounds so nice. He sees Minho every day now, Jingi a little less, but he’s realizing he hasn’t seen Kibum in forever. Longer than the last time he saw Taemin, even.

“I’ll go see the show if I can,” Jonghyun says finally.

Minho eyes him, and Jonghyun can sense he’s about to unburden himself, something about the way he leans back in his chair and rearranges his shoulders. If Minho wants to talk to him, that’s fine, but he never has before. This is new.

“It’s been kind of weird,” Minho says slowly, feeling his way. “Kibummie’s always busy, and, like. It’s so weird trying to find time to hang out, and whenever I go to his place it’s like he tries to impress me or something? Like he’s hosting me? I don’t know, I see more of you than I do of him these days, and you’re never even here.” 

Minho and Kibum are the same age, and once they stopped being awkward with each other, they became inseparable. And Jonghyun gets where Minho is coming from, gets how distance and time can mess with that kind of closeness, maybe a little too well. How could he not, when this year away from Taemin has felt longer than the five in which they lived together combined.

And then Minho says, “I think I see more of _Taeminnie_ these days than him,” and Jonghyun forgets all that.

“Really?” shoots out of him before he can even think, and he struggles to get his voice under control. “I haven’t even seen Taeminnie since last month.”

“Huh. I haven’t seen Kibummie in…two weeks?” Minho replies, like they’re comparing notes or something.

Jonghyun runs out of patience in record time. “You still talk to him on the phone every day. What about Taeminnie, when’s the last time you saw him?”

“He came by today,” Minho says, and maybe Jonghyun’s head explodes.

“To see you?” he demands. Then, the second he remembers he exists, “Jingi hyung?” 

Why does everyone show up when Jonghyun isn’t here?

“You know how he is, he’s always losing stuff. This is the second place he looks,” Minho says, like Jonghyun deserves a normal answer, and yes, Jonghyun does know how Taemin is. “And then he’ll lose something new while he’s here, and has to come back. He’s done this a million times this year.”

Jonghyun beats down the urge to ditch Minho and go to bed. He wants so badly to see if anything’s changed in their room, if Taemin left signs of himself behind, but he’s being stupid, so stupid it makes him a little sick. If he goes in there, he knows he won’t be able to make himself leave until he has somewhere else to be.

If he goes in there, he’ll just be alone again. 

“How did he look?” Jonghyun says instead, too fast again, so he forces himself to take his time, take a bite. “What did he say?”

“Taeminnie?” There’s no one else. Jonghyun waits, and Minho frowns, like it’s hard to remember anything worth mentioning. And Jonghyun keeps on waiting, and finally Minho offers, “He thinks he has to go on a diet again soon because he doesn’t want to exercise.”

“He always says that,” Jonghyun says immediately.

The company doesn’t watch Taemin’s weight that carefully because no matter what he eats he never gains any, but whenever he gets a haircut or drinks too much or spends a couple days on the couch, Taemin still comes up to Jonghyun and asks him if his face looks fat. 

Jonghyun wants more Taemin. “What else?”

Minho levels him with a look that says that Jonghyun is stupid. “He said to tell you to call him when you have time.”

If Taemin said that to his face, if he were here instead of Minho and Jonghyun could get his hands on him right now, he’s not sure what he’d do to him.

“Why can’t he call me?” Jonghyun snaps, because it’s Minho that said it, Minho who’s been sitting across from him and not reacting to any of the craziness Jonghyun has put on him in the last five minutes. It’s all coming out now, he can’t stop anymore. “He never texts me first, either. There’s no talking to him, he never listens, and I always have to do everything.”

“Maybe he knows how busy you are all the time? Maybe he thinks he’s bothering you, if you don’t talk to him first,” Minho says, like that should be totally obvious, and he’s not picking a fight, but still. With Minho, there are the things he says, and then there’s the way he says them, and maybe the reason Jonghyun wants to argue with him all the time is because all he can ever hear is _why are you so weird_ and _why is it so hard to get through to you._

Jonghyun bites his tongue.

Minho watches him, gets that look on his face like he’s just dying to say something, and Jonghyun wonders if Jingi is creeping in his room, or if they might wake him up in the next couple seconds, because if Minho opens his mouth again that’s probably it, Jonghyun will react.

But Minho goes totally off script in the end, because all he says is, “Do you think I normally eat dinner at three in the morning, hyung?”

 

A few hours later, Jonghyun calls Taemin instead of smoking his morning cigarette, standing around in the alley behind the studio. Within a couple seconds of hearing his voice he wants to see his face, so again, instead of spending his break mixing “Neon,” he sprints across the street and sits in the SM cafeteria with Taemin, who agreed to meet him there without question.

If Taemin wanted to be subtle about checking on Jonghyun, he might have showed up with something to say, some reason why they needed to talk. But Taemin never even thinks of stuff like that, and he’s totally wasting Jonghyun’s time right now, and maybe that’s why Jonghyun can’t stop himself from smiling at him.

“Eat up, hyung. You don’t have long, do you?”

“I can take an hour,” Jonghyun tells him, and then before he knows what he’s doing he’s confessing, “They hate me over there, maybe I won’t go back.”

Taemin’s brow pinches in sympathy, or maybe confusion. The two are always so closely related with Taemin that it’s hard for Jonghyun to tell one expression from the other. And when Jonghyun stops trying to figure him out he keeps looking, and other details start to filter in. Taemin’s hair is long enough now that it hangs in his eyes while he eats, and he’s wearing an old Shinee World T-shirt, pink for Kibum, and his fingernails are bitten to the quick.

Jonghyun wants to know what everything means suddenly, wants Taemin to explain every little part of himself.

“What are you doing today?” he asks.

“I said I would teach Jonginnie the steps to ‘Danger.’ It’s not fun at all, he keeps complaining that it’s harder than it looks,” Taemin replies, and Jonghyun wants to know if he’ll be right across the street all day, if he and Jongin have plans later. Taemin moves on first, says, “What about you, what are you working on?”

Jonghyun doesn’t want to talk about that. Still, he fishes his phone out of his pocket, and takes his time untangling his earbuds.

Taemin catches on and tips forward, hand coming up, but Jonghyun gets there first, reaches over and puts them in for him. Taemin lets him do it, and for a couple seconds Jonghyun has Taemin’s pretty face between his hands, dark eyes and pink lips, and Jonghyun wants to kiss him so badly he can taste it. He pushes a hand through Taemin’s hair instead, sweeping it back, and by the time he’s gone back to his side of the table and pressed play, it’s fallen into Taemin’s face again.

The first few notes of “Neon” visibly hit Taemin’s body, and then Taemin is saying, “I’ve heard this before, right?”

He’s right, but Jonghyun shushes him, because that was a different version, just a demo, just prologue. This is something more than that. Taemin keeps quiet until the song is over, and then he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t say anything and he’s so frustrating. Jonghyun is back to the part where he wants to kiss him, make his body talk instead.

“What do you think?” Jonghyun prompts him after long enough has passed.

The main engineer is not a big fan, and he’s been having a harder time hiding that the more time they spend working on it. And that’s okay, people don’t have to like every single song, as long as Jonghyun does. Jonghyun totally isn’t taking it personally, or anything, and it’s totally not fucking with him and making him question whether he should have fought so hard for “Neon,” whether his reasons were all bullshit and SM just let him win to keep him happy.

Taemin seems to wake up. “You’ve wanted to try neo-soul for a long time.”

“Yes…?”

“I remember your D’Angelo phase. Thanks to you I spent like half of 2012 with _Voodoo_ stuck in my head, like the whole album.”

“I’m not asking what you think of me, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says, and normally he wouldn’t have to try this hard to keep his patience with Taemin, and Jonghyun might hate himself right now. “I’m asking what you think of my song.”

“I know, I guess I can’t separate it out like you can,” Taemin gets out first, and then he takes his time, stares at Jonghyun for so long Jonghyun starts to feel shy, and goes back to his food. And then, eventually, Taemin says, “I don’t know if everybody will appreciate it, but I don’t think anyone else would sing it the way you do. I like it when you do whatever you want.”

Jonghyun sits through it while his body burns. He hasn’t slept and he’s in a terrible mood and he’s stuffed his mouth with rice to shut himself up, and then Taemin goes and says something like that and Jonghyun can’t do anything about it. That’s all it takes. He’s getting hard in his pants and he knows that even if he gets himself under control now he’s going to have problems all day, this moment won’t leave him no matter what he does.

He hates his life. He really does.

That doesn’t explain why he traps Taemin’s foot between his own under the table and tells him, “Minho says you’re getting fat,” or why he finds the breath to laugh when Taemin’s mouth goes small with annoyance.

“Ha ha. He told me you’re getting too skinny,” Taemin retorts, and then smirks at Jonghyun. “I probably weigh more than you right now~”

And suddenly it’s not funny anymore, maybe it never was. Taemin wants to take it back right away, Jonghyun can tell, from the way he starts eating too fast to hide that he can’t talk, the way he keeps shooting glances at Jonghyun, then can’t meet his eyes when Jonghyun catches him at it.

Jonghyun wants Taemin’s smile again, so he gets over it. Says Taemin’s name, and then again, until Taemin looks him in the face.

“What, hyung?” Taemin says, still uncertain.

“Just…It’s harder on me when you don’t talk to me,” Jonghyun says finally, because he doesn’t think he can say _I miss you_ or _I need you._ “I don’t care if it’s not important, okay? I have time for you.”

“I’m sorry I always reply to you so late. I do it to everyone, but I’m sorry I do it to you too,” Taemin says in a rush. “I don’t know when you’re going to text me.”

Jonghyun wasn’t expecting that at all. 

“Don’t worry about it, I’m used to you ignoring me,” he manages, and apparently that’s the exact wrong thing to say, because Taemin falters again.

It doesn’t take very long for Jonghyun to figure it out, because the answer is right in front of him. Taemin didn’t have to come in today. He could have turned Jonghyun down and gone back to sleep. Instead he probably dragged Jongin here so he wouldn’t have to wait around on his own, and now he’s sitting here eating cafeteria food and trying really hard to be good to Jonghyun. And somehow that makes everything worse. Somehow Jonghyun wishes Taemin hadn’t come, or maybe that he hadn’t called him.

Jonghyun really doesn’t want to say it, but he does. “Hyung is sorry, Taeminnie. I didn’t mean to say it like that, I’m just. I’m so tired.”

“I know, it’s fine,” Taemin says quickly, like he doesn’t want to hear it, either. He barely hesitates before he pushes his tray away from him and shovels the rest of his own rice on top of Jonghyun’s, forming a small mountain. Then he watches Jonghyun until Jonghyun picks up his spoon again. “Eat, hyung.”

Jonghyun eats. Taemin sits with him and talks to him, and he never looks at the clock, so Jonghyun keeps an eye on it. As their time ticks down, it would be so much easier for Jonghyun to stop listening, to leave Taemin behind and return to “Neon,” not the version on his phone he could show Taemin, but the one in his head. Instead he hangs on to every word, every expression, every movement, and wishes he knew how to save these things for later.

He doesn’t know if being with Taemin like this just makes the time without him worse, but Jonghyun doesn’t know what else to do. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to get through everything else if he didn’t let himself have this much. Maybe even his album is just one more thing.

 

Soon enough, for better or worse, his album is definitively _a_ thing. He knows because he sat in the control room and listened to it front to back, and couldn’t find anything else that absolutely needed changing. And then he listened to it again, and again, and then he might have gone to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and cried.

Jonghyun doesn’t know how it happened. How November is down to just a few days left, how the recording schedule SM showed him before he started is in the garbage can now, onto the next. How he can’t seem to remember any of it unless he goes song-by-song instead of day-by-day. 

The point is he’s done everything he can.

Well, not quite. December and January belong to SM the same way the last month and a half belonged to him, and Jonghyun has years of experience at this point telling him what to expect from them, but he still doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen next. He still has to get through it. He doesn’t know, either, if this is goodbye to the music that’s lived inside him for years, or if it’ll stay this personal when he’s caked in make up and dancing for the cameras and trying to outsing his own pre-recorded voice.

He can’t look forward to the parts coming up, the photos and the videos and the interviews and schedule after schedule after schedule after schedule. And yet, he’s grateful that he has a little longer before he has to catch up to Taemin, before he has to move on and figure out what he can take from this part of his life. For now, he’s going to love his album. He’s going to give it the best of everything.

Because he’s realizing only now how much he has left to do, and forget all the stuff he hates, he has no cover, no title. He doesn’t know what face he should give his music.

The other thing is he has nothing to show off. He does go behind SM’s back and bribe one of the engineers to let him download the digital master onto his phone once it’s finalized. And as soon as he does, Jonghyun is going to show it to Taemin and his family and probably Jingi and Minho, and they can show Kibum, and then he’ll show Nine too, and anybody else he can think of. Until then, though, he has to play it cool. Or at least that’s what he keeps telling himself.

Days pass.

 

And then.

Jonghyun has had it in the back of his head this whole time that things would go to hell at some point. Sure enough, his first meeting with SM post-production goes something like:

One.

“It seems there’s been a misunderstanding? We thought we made our intentions clear to you at the beginning of this process—that we would promote the album with ‘Crazy.’”

Two.

“Please calm down, Jonghyun-ssi. Think about it from our perspective. ‘Crazy’ has been vetted by our system, it’s marketable, it fits your target audience, it has sex appeal. We wouldn’t have let you record ‘Deja-Boo’ if it we didn’t believe that it’s a good song, but it’s untested. If no one buys your album, no one will listen to it, either.”

And three.

“We’ve already narrowed down a list of choreographers who would be a great fit for the song and for you, and the creative team has started developing the concept for your video. It’s our understanding that you’ll show skin, so if there’s something you need to work on before filming…”

Yeah. Hell.

Jonghyun wants out.

He doesn’t even know what that means.

He gets as close as he can. Pavement under his feet and air so cold it hurts to breathe, maze of streets and finally buildings he can’t recognize, silent world and hip hop blasting in his ears. If he looks up he’ll see the same sky he could find any night, anywhere in Seoul, so he blinds himself to it, sticks to the yellow street light.

He fucking knew this would happen the whole time. What has he been doing, he’s so dumb. 

He wants to talk.

It’s four in the morning. He can’t call anyone.

He has whole conversations in his head instead.

Nine would probably tell him, _It’s not the end of the world, Jonghyun-ah. You said you knew this would happen, so why aren’t you okay with it by now? What’s so bad about ‘Crazy,’ you even wrote the lyrics._

“I got this far because I thought I could change things,” he says out loud, and whatever. He can’t hear his voice over his headphones, and no one else can, either. The whole neighborhood is asleep except for him. “They just want to put me back in the same box. I can’t take much more of that, I thought you would understand.”

 _It’s_ your _body, so what. Who told you to get chocolate abs?_ Nine replies, and then he can’t get her to say anything else, and for a couple seconds he hates the real Nine, the one who saw him two hours ago and asked him if something was wrong and then didn’t ask again when he said it was nothing.

That’s not fair. He never notices her problems unless she says something, either. Which she never really does.

He’s not going to think about Taemin.

He doesn’t think about Taemin. Doesn’t imagine him saying, _You did your best, right, hyung?_

Doesn’t remember the uncertain look Taemin would get on his face way back when they sang lives on the radio, and Jonghyun went off key or his voice cracked or he forgot the words. Doesn’t think about the way Taemin freezes when Jonghyun loses his temper or lies to his face, or the way he never understands what’s going on when Jonghyun breaks down in front of him.

Jonghyun doesn’t want Taemin to see him like this. Ever. He doesn’t want to see what it would do to Taemin’s face, if he could see that Jonghyun hyung is a fuckup and a total loser, that Jonghyun hyung doesn’t know what he’s doing any more than Taemin does, he just hides it better. That Jonghyun hyung only ever really feels good about himself when Taemin lets him know how much Taemin needs him. 

If the person Taemin looks up to were real, would he have told SM to go fuck themselves? Probably not, right?

Shinee’s Jonghyun would be professional. He’d do the exact same thing he did when SM passed over “Symptoms” for “Everybody”: go out there and do his job, keep on smiling and flirt with honesty whenever he got half a chance.

Jonghyun doesn’t know why he’s the only one that cares this much, out of all the different versions of himself, all the people he’s tried so hard to be. Wonders if that’s just because it’s easier to act like they’re separate from him somehow, when he’s already this much closer to giving in himself. His heart is slowing down, his legs are cramping up, his limbs are numb with cold, his phone is dying, and his nerves are in revolt because he doesn’t know where he is and he has to get back, he has somewhere he has to be in a few hours.

He gets as far as the next cross street, then cuts the music and calls for a taxi.

 

Jonghyun needs a shower, so he goes back to the dorm. He has time.

Stepping out of the bathroom, he notices Jingi for the first time. He’s sitting on the couch, playing Donkey Kong Country.

Minho’s mentioned that Jingi trekked over to Yongsan Electronics Market and bought a Super Nintendo sometime this summer, and that it annoys the shit out of him, because whenever Jingi uses it he unplugs Minho’s PS4 and rearranges the audiovisual cables and never puts anything back. Minho’s whining probably annoys the shit out of Jingi, too, and Minho’s in bed right now.

Suddenly Jonghyun doesn’t want to be alone. Maybe he’s just realizing.

He crosses over and sits down next to Jingi. Jingi lets him play the next life, has the controller back in under a minute. Jonghyun gets in the swing of things, though, he had this friend in elementary school that had a SNES and they used to play this game. That kid was everybody’s friend.

They get all the way to Tree Top Town before anyone says anything.

“Hyung,” Jonghyun starts, then second-guesses. “Forget it.”

Jingi glances at him. “Forget what?”

Jonghyun has to say something to someone, and Jingi won’t remember this later.

“You have to do something, only you’ve done it a million times before. Everybody expects you to do it the way you’ve always done, it’s a problem for them if you don’t. You think you have a better way. What do you do, what’s the right answer?”

Jingi thinks it over.

“If nobody gets what they want, everybody gets what they want. Something like that?” Jingi says at last.

“What does that even mean?” Jonghyun asks. This wasn’t a bad idea, talking to Jingi of all people, but maybe it wasn’t a good one either. 

But then Jingi says simply, “Compromise,” and that stays with Jonghyun.

 

It works.

It works it works it works.

Jingi is a genius, and Jonghyun did it, and it works.

 

It works, and now Jonghyun has three weeks to get his body back to its peak. Three fucking weeks.

This is how it’s going to be: Jonghyun will do the video. He’ll give SM all the abs they want. They’ll release “Crazy” as a single, too. Only, “Deja-Boo” will also be a single. And it’s going to be the song Jonghyun promotes on all the music shows.

And maybe the video will last longer, maybe people will only remember that, maybe “Crazy” will outsell “Deja-Boo,” but SM won’t lose any money, and anyway, this is about the things Jonghyun is going to do. He’s going to perform his song. He’s going to dance to his song. He’ll win or lose, receive love or be rejected, as himself. 

But first, abs.

Jonghyun hasn’t worked out regularly since he started recording, and he’s lost a lot of definition. Lost too much weight, too, probably. Somewhere in that time he stopped looking in the mirror when he got out of the shower, and he’s going to give himself at least a week before he starts up again.

He works out twice a day, because it won’t help to do any more than that. His sleep schedule is so fucked up that his morning session happens during his lunch hour, in between vocal and dance practice, and then he has to fit the other one in at three or four in the morning, some time after Blue Night. His muscles put up an epic fight at first, and his body pleads for mercy in all the time in between, and Jonghyun isn’t sure he’s going to be able to do this at all, but he’s learned something from being an idol all these years: he doesn’t give himself a choice.

Plus, Minho. When he hears that Jonghyun has gotten back on the fitness train, he decides he should, too. Minho goes for hour long runs every day for fun, so Jonghyun figures that means he’ll train for a marathon or something, but instead Minho tags along with him to the gym, does all the same things as Jonghyun, and makes it all look so easy. He talks the whole time, too, unless there are sports on the television.

“Can you tell yet?” Minho always asks him at the end, flexing his muscles at Jonghyun and trying to get a good look at himself, and Jonghyun always says no, just because he can.

That’s not even the worst thing, because Minho starts them both on a diet. Jonghyun misses the days when he’d get back and have takeout shoved in his face. Now it’s always chicken breast. Minho can’t cook, either, it’s always dry and tough and it smells bad, and if Jonghyun conveniently runs late, it’s still waiting for him, only dryer and tougher and smellier, and cold on top of that. He doesn’t try that more than once.

Jonghyun knows he’s going to lose it when promotions start and this life closes in on him again, that this is all for nothing. Still, he’s up six pounds and he’s up to three hours of sleep on the good nights, and he can look at himself again. 

 

In the end, the choreography for “Deja-Boo” is light. It’s so easy Jonghyun perfected it in a day, and after two weeks of working on it, he thinks he could do it in his sleep. These are all good things, because he’s not trying to impress anyone, that’s not the point. Jonghyun wants to be able to sing without having to worry about controlling his breathing for once.

He still wants Taemin to look at it.

“I don’t understand what you want me to do, hyung,” Taemin says. “I don’t know the steps, either, so you should know better than me.”

He only showed up after Jonghyun’s normal practice ended, so he missed the part where the instructor and the dancer hyungs could have helped him with that. Jonghyun’s been here for hours, and he spent the morning singing in the room down the hall, but Taemin came to Jonghyun from a world of sunshine and blue skies. There’s no way to tell in this room what time it is. Just four walls and fluorescent lights. It’ll look the same after dark.

Jonghyun’s already demonstrated once, but he’ll do it again. He thinks he’s heard and performed “Deja-Boo” three hundred times today already, but it feels new with Taemin here.

“Do whatever you want to it,” Jonghyun says this time when he’s done. “I just want to make sure I’m expressing the song properly. There are a lot of different parts, you know?”

Taemin thinks he does, but he still wants to see it again, and this time he lines up next to Jonghyun and follows his movements, and suddenly Jonghyun doesn’t know what to do, stuck in his body. He’s so used to it being the other way around, so used to watching Taemin and trying to match him. He doesn’t think Taemin feels this way when Jonghyun’s eyes are on him, he doesn’t think he makes Taemin’s skin burn, his palms sweat, his mind blank out, not like this.

And then, sure enough. What took Jonghyun a day takes Taemin two or three tries, and then he’s off, he’s bringing Jonghyun’s song to life better than Jonghyun ever could. Jonghyun barely realizes he’s stopped to stare, and then he can’t bring himself to care. Taemin is too far gone to notice him.

This is so not the point, Jonghyun is supposed to be getting Taemin’s technical perspective, he’s supposed to ask for advice on specific points. He’s not supposed to watch Taemin and want to forget everything he’s learned about dancing, because it seems too cheap for the beauty he sees.

“Do you want to just take my place, Taeminnie?” he says, and then wants to take it back, because Taemin stops to look at him. The song goes on ahead, bass thudding, and suddenly Jonghyun wants to say more. “Everything looks better when you do it.”

“Focus, hyung,” Taemin admonishes him, like that’s the problem here.

Jonghyun tries to catch up again, but it’s not as simple as that. Taemin will change a couple things around without realizing, and by the time Jonghyun figures out what he’s done, Taemin is already onto the next thing. It works, though, they’re getting somewhere. And if Jonghyun asks Taemin to explain his thinking, Taemin takes as long as he needs to give Jonghyun real answers.

They take a break and find out they’ve been at it for four hours. Eight o’clock. That means Jonghyun has three hours of Taemin left. Less than half.

They spend some of the time at the vending machine in the lobby. Taemin wants pop, and Jonghyun does too, but he gets himself water. He can see the night through the glass doors, two neat rectangles of black, but he leaves it behind when they go back up and sit on the practice room floor to drink. They’re too gross to do anything else, really.

After a while, Jonghyun feels Taemin’s eyes on him again, a few seconds at a time, and it’s different from before. This time it sits in his stomach.

“Hyung,” Taemin begins, and Jonghyun knows. “I said I’d meet up with some friends for drinks tonight. I didn’t know this would take so long.”

Jonghyun keeps his face under control, because Taemin can see everything in this light. “Jongin?”

“Mm. Him and a couple others,” Taemin says, then rests his cheek on his knees, giving Jonghyun a sideways look. “I can go some other time, I see them all the time.”

“It’s okay, go ahead,” is what Jonghyun should say, so he does. He can’t stop himself from ruining it, though, writing his own tragedy. “I’ll just stay here and work on this a bit longer.”

“Hyung…”

Jonghyun drinks faster. It’s no good, he’ll still have to wait for Taemin in the end, Taemin who’s totally forgotten his pop to stare at Jonghyun, but he needs something to do right now. Minutes tick by. This is stupid. Taemin is going to be late. Jonghyun wants this moment to be over and done with. And yet, he never wants to reach the end of the bottle, never wants Taemin to stop looking at him and go back to his drink. Never wants to stand and reach down to take Taemin by the elbow and help him up, just because.

Of course, all those things happen. It’s just, they happen to Jonghyun. The same way so many nothings have happened to him since the first day he looked at Taemin and felt his heart flutter. He still can’t help it, and it never hurts any less.

“Don’t worry about me, Taemin-ah. You’ve done enough, I can figure out the rest,” Jonghyun says, and gives him a foul smile. “Have fun.”

Taemin doesn’t say anything, just gives him this look, and leaves. Jonghyun doesn’t think he’s said or done anything so weird that Taemin wouldn’t even say goodbye to him, but he’s not in his right mind, so what would he know.

He absolutely fucking hates “Deja-Boo” when he turns it on this time. He’s come full circle today, and he’ll probably get up tomorrow and love it again. If he sleeps, if he gets up. Otherwise he’ll have to wait a while longer before he can get rid of this shitty feeling.

He’s halfway through when Taemin suddenly reappears.

He doesn’t want to talk about it, just says, “Let’s just do this,” when Jonghyun opens his mouth, and this strange bright feeling rips through Jonghyun, and he doesn’t know what he was going to say, even.

There’s nothing left to work on, either, not really, and Jonghyun thinks if he dances any more his legs will give out, and Taemin is unstoppable, he’s inhuman, and Jonghyun might be crazy but Taemin looks so cute when he’s mad, Jonghyun never gets to see him like this. And Jonghyun is crazy, so crazy, he’s not sure if he wants to laugh or cry, how to get Taemin to look at him again, because somehow that’s the most important thing now.

The first step is probably to stop trying. Jonghyun isn’t good at that.

“Don’t fuck around, hyung, come on,” Taemin snaps out of nowhere.

Jonghyun wasn’t even doing anything.

“Don’t get mad at me, Taeminnie,” he says, and he’s not sure he means it. And then, “Whenever I fuck up you always think I’m doing it on purpose, do you think I’m as good at this as you are?” And he really needs to shut himself up but it’s too late, too late, “Do you think I can’t fuck up, or something? I do all the time, though.”

Taemin stops, and this time he looks Jonghyun right in the eye, and gives him a new face, one Jonghyun doesn’t think he’s ever seen, one he doesn’t understand.

“This is your song, so get it right,” Taemin says to him, and, “It’s not about fucking up or not, all you have to do is try. Sometimes you just don’t want to.”

That’s not fair. Taemin is always so unfair to him.

They keep going until neither of them even knows what they’re doing anymore, and then they run out of time again and wash up in the bathroom across the hall. Taemin didn’t bring a change of clothes, and Jonghyun would let him have his, if he didn’t have work after this.

As it is, Jonghyun peels his sweats off and gets dressed while Taemin runs the tap until it’s ice cold, and tries not to react when Taemin checks the progress Jonghyun’s body has made, feels up the muscles in his stomach and arms. Then waits around while Taemin splashes water on his face and gets it everywhere, down his front and puddled at his feet.

And then Taemin lifts his head, hair in his eyes, and Jonghyun reaches over to help without thinking about it. It’s wet so it slips through Jonghyun’s fingers, cool and silken, and then Jonghyun gets a good look at Taemin’s face right now, water beading in his eyelashes and running down his chin.

He wants to think time stops, but he doesn’t care anymore. If it passes, if he’s supposed to be someplace else and he’s still right here, he doesn’t care.

Taemin goes still when Jonghyun slides his hand down to cup his cheek, so that his thumb presses into the soft corner of his mouth. He looks so normal that Jonghyun doesn’t know how to close the distance, but he can’t step away, can’t move on to the part where he’s not touching Taemin anymore, when it should be coming any second now. If Taemin wants to get there, he can, anytime. Jonghyun won’t hold onto him.

“Taemin-ah…”

His voice doesn’t sound like his own.

_Do you need a ride home? Are you hungry? Do you want to sleep here with me?_

It would be so easy to say any of those things, the hard part would only come after. Still, Jonghyun waits.

“Hyung, Blue Night,” Taemin says finally, like Jonghyun made him say it.

But that’s not what Jonghyun wanted to hear, not at all.

By the time they get out into the night, it’s already eleven thirty and Jonghyun is going to have to speed to get to MBC on time.

“Say good night, at least,” he says to Taemin, and he knows he’s being awful, but he’ll hate himself later.

Taemin takes a minute, then says, “Good night, hyung,” and ruffles Jonghyun’s hair, and Jonghyun hates that he lets him do it, hates how nice it feels.

 

This time Jonghyun is the one who asks Nine to get a drink, and she only agrees when he changes it to food.

He texts Minho to let him know he’s ditching him, and then goes with her. They end up at a street stall a couple blocks away from work. Jonghyun has a cap on and the few people left are either drunk or over forty, or both, so he should be okay, he can talk here. He doesn’t want anything, but Nine orders both tteokbokki and fish cakes and makes him pay for it. 

He lets her eat for a while, and then he tells her, “I’m in love with someone,” and it’s not like he’s never said those words before, but he’s never been able to say them about Taemin.

“Should I be happy for you?” she replies.

Nine always asks the hard questions.

“Some other time, yes,” Jonghyun says, immediately wants to correct himself, say, _most other times,_ but instead he puts his head down on the table and says, “Just not right now.”

“Aigoo, did you get rejected?”

“What? No, it’s not like that,” because it’s not. Jonghyun takes a deep, shuddering breath, and now his eyes are burning, so he squeezes them shut. “There’s nothing to reject, even.”

“Jonghyun-ah…” Nine sighs, and when her hand lands on Jonghyun’s shoulder, it just weighs him down. “Look, I don’t know anything about it, and you can tell me to shut up if you want, but love is _always_ like that. You get accepted or rejected, simple as that. If you haven’t said anything to her, it’s probably because you know that.”

That’s the other thing. “Him.”

“Same thing,” she tells him, barely skipping a beat. Then, “How long has it been?”

Jonghyun doesn’t know exactly. Taemin feels like forever to him. “Two or three years? But I’ve known him for nine.”

“Since you were kids, huh?” Nine says, and all of the sudden Jonghyun can see Taemin as he first knew him, cute and bright-eyed and silent as a ghost, and it makes him want to smile, even though his chest is hurting like this. “And he doesn’t know?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t want him to,” Jonghyun says, all very fast. Nine waits him out, and the longer it takes him, the worse it gets, so he goes on blindly, “I just, I don’t want things to change, I don’t want to lose him. I can’t. He needs me.”

“Things have already changed, though, you’ve changed. And why should you have to live like this, just because he needs you?”

Jonghyun shrugs her hand off him, wishes he had never said anything. Somehow he can’t make himself tell her to shut up, like she said he could. He badly wants to rage at her, wants to make himself sick crying and let her deal with it, but there’s no point, it’s not her fault.

He says, “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Jonghyun-ah, I’m talking to _you._ I’m telling _you,_ you can’t go on like this,” Nine says. “You aren’t happy, you said so. I don’t know if this is just another thing, or if it’s the main thing, but it isn’t good for you.”

Jonghyun kind of snaps.

“Do you think I’d be happy without him?” and before he can get it out all the way, “I won’t stop seeing him, and I can’t, either, that’s not even an option.” 

And suddenly he’s shoved himself upright to look her in the face, but he doesn’t know what he expected. She’s not looking at him like she pities him, or he disgusts her, or anything like that. She just looks the same.

“Then…either you confess, or you put an end to your feelings. That’s what people do.” 

The smile on her face is barely there, like she’s just testing it out. Jonghyun doesn’t want to see it.

Then she says, gently this time, “Don’t you think he’d understand you?”

And that’s worse. Understanding. Jonghyun doesn’t want Taemin to hate him, but he doesn’t want anything from Taemin at all, if that’s how it’s going to be. He wants Taemin’s love. He wants Taemin to want every single thing from Jonghyun that he wants from Taemin. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t ask for anything less than that, if he did ask Taemin for anything.

Nine might laugh in his face if he says any of that out loud, though, so he lets her have the last word. They talk about other things, his album, her band, the weather, the new year, and she finishes eating, and he cheats on his diet and helps her. And then they go back, and she gets in her car and he gets in his, and when he’s alone with himself at last, again, the tears don’t come.

He has nothing to do but think.

 

Jonghyun names his album Base.

He gives the art team a copy of _Ace,_ and they’re confused as to why he thinks he needs to show them their own work, until he explains that he wants his album to be its twin.

“The logo, the font, the picture, everything,” he says. “The details can be different, as long as the idea is the same.”

They were going in a totally different direction before he showed up and started telling them what to do, but they’re nice about it. They understand where he’s coming from, they’ll see what they can do. He knows he has them when they say they think the fans would like it.

Jonghyun thinks so, too, but that’s not the point. He’s doing it for Taemin to see.

 

It’s January before he knows it, but then, he was expecting that.

“Deja-Boo” drops on the seventh, and it’s not the next day when Jonghyun arrives at the venue for his showcase, not really. Jonghyun hasn’t slept at all. He lay in bed for hours instead, waking his phone up over and over to reread the same message from Taemin:

_see u tomorrow hyung ^^_

Minho comes along, because that’s what he does these days. He has no life right now, he’s not working or dating or doing anything with himself as far as Jonghyun can see, and yet, Minho keeps wasting his freedom on shit like this. Still, Jonghyun is realizing for maybe the first time that he’s glad Minho is here.

“Don’t be nervous,” Minho says, and Jonghyun takes that back. He wishes Minho would just disappear like Taemin, or stay in his room and let the world go by like Jingi. “Today is just for the fans, you can start getting stressed out next week.”

Jonghyun knows that. But maybe he won’t have any fans left after this. Maybe he’ll walk out there and play the last couple months of his life back for them, and they’ll wonder who it is they’ve liked and supported all these years. Maybe they’ll only like it because it’s him. He already knows a lot of them would stick with him no matter what, no matter how stupid or embarrassing he gets, how hard it is to defend him, because he’s been there before with Shinee. Maybe that’s worse, maybe that’s scarier.

He’s already in hair and make up, and he’s no longer wearing his own clothes, and with his body off limits he has nowhere to take out his frustration, no way to get this feeling out of him. He thinks about destroying Minho’s good mood, but that’s too much effort, and it won’t get him anywhere. He needs to calm down.

“When I acted in my first drama, I wished you guys could do it with me somehow,” Minho says.

“Does that make any sense?” Jonghyun snaps, and suddenly there are a thousand things on the tip of his tongue. 

_I’m fine, I already did the important part. It’s the same as it is with Shinee, I just have to get through the next couple weeks. I’ll go through the same things inside, whether you guys are there or not._

He’s not going to say any of that. He should just quit talking, full stop, but his throat has closed, and there’s no way for him to retreat into silence now. Which, Minho has made it his mission in life lately to put up with Jonghyun, so whatever.

It’s okay, because Minho probably doesn’t know when Jonghyun says, “What if people don’t like my music?” he means, _what if they don’t like me?_ Or when he says, “What if they don’t get it, what if they think it’s shit?” he means, _what if I really am shit?_

But Minho surprises him.

“Who would think that about you, hyung? Everyone in our profession looks up to you, and our fans love you best,” he says hotly, like he’s arguing with Jonghyun or something. He’s so lame.

“A lot of people think I’m no good. Believe me, I would know,” Jonghyun says, already tired of this. That doesn’t explain why his eyes itch and his voice sounds so scratchy and his hands are kind of shaking.

“Netizens don’t count. They hate people for no reason, they probably haven’t even listened to your songs, and they won’t listen to _Base_ ,” Minho huffs. When Jonghyun glances up at his face, Minho’s face is so open that it’s hard to hold his eyes for long. “I think you’re cool, and I know way more about it than they do.”

That’s a little too much.

“What do you know?” And maybe Jonghyun is being too harsh, but he doesn’t need Minho to puff him up, he’s not that pathetic, and he’s not this close to crying. “I know you’re just trying to help, but you can stop. You aren’t helping at all.”

“I know a lot, though,” Minho says mulishly, and then he finally comes out with it. “I listen to Blue Night almost every night.”

“No you don’t,” Jonghyun says, because if this is a joke…but Minho’s face doesn’t change, and there’s no punch line. Jonghyun buries his face in his hands, before he remembers the half hour Coordi Noona spent working on it, and lets the strength drain out of his arms. Hunches in on himself and hides.

“What? It’s a good program,” Minho says, only half in protest. 

Jonghyun knows Blue Night is a public broadcast, he knows that. But it’s also intensely personal, two hours at the end of each day that belong to him, and only him. It’s strange thinking about any of the members hearing some of the things he says on there, but with Minho it’s probably the strangest, because that’s a side of Jonghyun Minho has never brought out when they’re together.

It’s like, Minho listens to Jonghyun’s diary. Next his mom will be Youtubing Internet War.

“And…I think maybe there was a lot I never understood about you,” Minho continues with zero embarrassment. He thumps Jonghyun’s back, wrenching a sob out of him. “Ah, whatever. I’m done pretending that I don’t like you as much as I do, so get used to it, hyung.”

“Even now, you’re still so annoying,” Jonghyun says thickly, emerging to glare at him because he’s already given himself away. Of course Minho had to say this kind of stuff when he’s already a total wreck, of course he had to push Jonghyun that tiny bit over the edge.

“Aigoo,” Minho sighs, and leans over to shake a tissue out of the box on the counter, hands it to him.

Jonghyun snatches it away, “I really hate you right now and I’m not pretending, but thanks,” and turns to face the mirror, see what he’s done to himself now.

In the end it’s nothing Coordi Noona can’t fix in five minutes, and if Jonghyun can’t forget he broke down in front of Minho, can’t look at him quite the same way as he did before, that’s fine. Minho has been trying to let Jonghyun know that he’s there for him for a long time, but somehow the little things never added up for Jonghyun. Figures he’d only get the message after completely humiliating himself.

Anyway, all that matters is that he’s back to normal by the time Taemin shows up.

Jonghyun hasn’t seen him since that night, and that was weeks ago now. He hasn’t thought about him, either, he’s been so busy. He never sent any of the million replies he wrote last night. None of that makes any difference.

For Jonghyun, nothing ever will. He’s decided that much.

“How do I look?” Jonghyun asks him.

Taemin takes his time, brushing his hands over Jonghyun’s face and straightening his tie.

Then he meets Jonghyun’s eyes and smiles and Jonghyun forgets everything else. “You’re good.”

And then Jonghyun has to go.

 

 _Base_ spends its first week at number two in the charts.

Jonghyun spends its first week in hell.

Every day is the same. Blue Night. Dorm. Shower. Bedroom ceiling. Traffic. Music show part one. Traffic. Bullshit. Traffic. Music show part two. Traffic. More bullshit. Traffic. Blue Night. Dorm. Count the time until it begins again. He stops being a person, crams the necessities of life into the middle of all that, if he can make them fit. If he’s not too hungry to eat, if he’s not too tired to sleep.

None of that is new, except this time he’s all alone. He never gets human contact besides the manager hyung SM hired to take care of him, and he doesn’t know him at all. They met for the first time in the predawn street outside the dorm, and they only see each other when neither is in the mood to talk. The things they do share are too much time in the car, the need to de-stress, and a love for American hip hop. Manager Hyung is completely obsessed with Outkast, and Jonghyun has never heard of them, but now he is too, by default.

It’s not that he misses the others, because he doesn’t have the energy or the time to get that far. Just, he has to do everything, and if he makes a mistake, no one can save him. If he’s bored out of his mind, there’s no one to distract him. If he doesn’t feel like talking, there’s no one to cover for him. If he starts to go crazy, there’ll be no one to stop him.

He misses them. He even misses Jingi and Minho, and he still sees their faces most days.

He misses Taemin most, but that’s obvious. It’s existential. Some days he needs him so badly he can’t breathe for thinking of him, and then other days, he almost manages to convince himself that Taemin would be bad for him right now. If he sees him he’ll never be able to go back to this shit. If he sees Taemin and talks to him right now, he’ll just get it wrong, and then he doesn’t know what he’ll do. He has to wait.

He keeps losing, too.

His first time with “Deja-Boo,” it’s like it’s 2008 and “Replay” all over again. He has to force his voice out of his chest, he can’t hear himself over the MR, he doesn’t know where to put his feet, where to put his eyes, he can't keep up with his heart it's beating so fast, and it’s like this is all happening to someone else. None of that shows on the tapes, but he knows he’s going to lose.

And then he loses, not by much, but he loses. He thinks that’s it, he’s finished, he’s fucked up and SM only let him do this so they could laugh in his face, so he’d never try it again. 

And then he goes back to the beginning. He likes “Deja-Boo.” He’s proud of it. He’ll keep performing it with his head up, with a sincere heart. If he doesn’t win this time, then he’ll do it next time. And then again, and again. He’s going to take his baby all the way to the top.

He just has to hang on until then.

 

Jonghyun can take less and less of his room without Taemin, so he starts taking over the couch in the living room instead. There are two main advantages: he can collapse in half the distance, and chances are someone else will be around if he can’t sleep.

Tonight, this morning, whatever, it’s Jingi, playing SNES and sitting on the floor because Jonghyun won’t move his legs unless asked.

Jingi wants to know how promotions are going, and Jonghyun doesn’t want to think about it. He has nothing to say back, either. It’s been half a year since Jingi’s surgery, and Jingi finished retraining his voice a while back now, and he hasn’t done a thing since.

Jonghyun decides to talk, and maybe he says a little more than he should, maybe he’s too tired to know where he should stop. “Hyung, you should start thinking about your career now. Taeminnie beat both of us, and now I’m doing it. Maybe you should’ve been first, but you’re next.”

Jingi cranes his neck to look up at him. “I don’t know, my life looks a lot easier than yours right now.”

“Does easier mean the same thing as better?” Jonghyun says, kind of disgusted, but he doesn’t really want an answer, so he moves on before Jingi starts to think he does. “Don’t you have anything you want to try that you can’t do with Shinee?”

“Sure, lots of things. Trot, for one.”

It’s so difficult to talk to him. “Do you want to do a trot album because it sounds fun, or do you actually want to become a trot singer?”

“I see what you’re trying to say…but I guess I don’t agree with it?” Jingi replies slowly. “Why can’t I be a trot singer when I do a trot album, and a pop singer when I do pop albums?”

Forget difficult, he’s impossible.

Jonghyun has lost count of the times people in this industry have told him that he has an artistic personality, like that’s the only way to explain why he speaks his mind, why he asks questions, why he doesn’t always want to do things the way everyone else does them. Like Jonghyun is a problem, a weirdo. Somehow no one has ever figured out that Jingi is so much worse than him.

“You’re dreaming, you won’t get anywhere if you keep that up,” Jonghyun tells him, because someone has to. “It doesn’t work like that, hyung, it just doesn’t. You have to fight them the whole way just to have a chance, and if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re done. Don’t waste your time on stuff that doesn’t mean anything.”

Jingi doesn’t agree with that, either.

“The way I look at it…I’m Onew in public, and I’m Jingi when I’m at home. I’m never Jingi in public, and I’m never Onew at home. There are a lot of things Onew could try and do, but Jingi’s not, I’m not like you. I don’t need to put myself in my music. I’m fine if the only people who know me are the people I know, too.”

Jonghyun thinks about that for a while. “Then are you a part of Shinee when you’re Jingi?”

“Sure,” Jingi says, like that’s obvious. “It’s not like I’m unemployed when I’m not at work, does that make any sense? I don’t stop caring about you guys, either, and I don’t stop trying to figure out how to make Onew better.”

It’s not like that for Jonghyun. He doesn’t know how to be anything other than himself, wherever he goes, whatever he does, however he feels, and he can’t take it if he thinks he’s being shut up, or misunderstood, or forced into things he doesn’t want to do. The times he gives in, the times he has to be someone he’s not, are always the worst times for him. Still, maybe if he knew how to think like Jingi, maybe if Lee Sooman had given Jonghyun a cool stage name…maybe.

Maybe he’s just selfish. Maybe he can’t handle not getting what he wants. Maybe that’s the difference between him and Jingi.

“Jonghyun-ah,” Jingi says, cutting right through all that.

“What, hyung?”

“Coming out of my surgery, and up until now…I’m just grateful to have my voice back. As long as I can sing, I’m okay.”

“You don’t have any greed left, is that it?” Jonghyun says. Then, “Is it?”

Jonghyun knows better. He knows that’s the kind of platitude people like to throw around when something big has changed for them and they’re trying to find their way back to normal. As soon as they reach a point where they can forget, and take the small things for granted again, they always do. But Jingi is suddenly making so much sense to him right now, like he has answers, and Jonghyun has to know.

“It’s not like that. If it had gone bad, if I couldn’t have learned to sing again, I don’t think I’d even want to use my voice to talk. When you realize you can’t live without something, you have to do whatever you can to make it yours again, or you’ll go crazy.”

 

When Jonghyun texts Taemin on Friday morning, he counts on having at least a whole day before he gets a reply. Instead, his life gets decided in twenty minutes. That’s the time it takes to get to the track with the baby in the background on Manager Hyung’s CD, ten minutes away from Music Bank and the time where he’d have been able to ignore it.

Jonghyun asked to meet, said he needed to talk. Taemin said okay. Asked when he had time.

Jonghyun says tonight, after Blue Night.

The rest of the details fill in too fast.

His phone buzzes in his pocket while he’s stretched out on the couch in his waiting room, and he finds out that Taemin is okay with that. He asks Taemin if he wants to eat together, and then turns off his phone. He already knows Taemin will say yes, because he knows how promotions are, knows Jonghyun hasn’t had a proper meal in days. He doesn’t need to know that Jonghyun just wants to buy himself time and that’s the only way he can think of.

Still, his heart jumps out of his chest when he leaves the set and Manager Hyung returns his phone and he has to check again. Taemin wants pork bone stew.

Jonghyun doesn’t think about all the times before they debuted when he took Taemin to the night market at Dongdaemun after practice and had pork bone stew with him. He says fine, says he knows a place.

Within minutes Taemin tells him that he’ll take a taxi to MBC and meet Jonghyun there, he’ll just get lost if Jonghyun gives him directions to the restaurant. Jonghyun was already expecting that, too, it makes no sense in that particular way Taemin never does.

He says he can take Taemin home afterwards. Taemin hesitates for another five minutes, probably wrestling with his guilt over making Jonghyun spend an extra fifteen minutes dropping him off, and then he sends Jonghyun a smiley face. And then, that’s it.

All he has left now is the waiting.

 

“You said you wanted to talk.”

The problem with eating this late is that you never have to wait for service. Jonghyun and Taemin got here a little while ago, and the ahjumma came out with their stew within ten minutes, asked them if they needed anything else and then went back to her drama rerun.

“Later, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says, keeping his face over his bowl. “Hyung is really hungry. Come on, eat.”

Taemin does what he’s told for once, and in the next second Jonghyun wishes he hadn’t said anything, because now all he wants is to listen to Taemin talk. He wants to hear everything, anything, wants to fill himself with the tiny, stupid things he’s missed, in case Taemin never wants to let him in again after tonight.

He can’t figure out how to get Taemin started, though, tries a couple times and gets nowhere. When he asks about Taemin’s day, Taemin says, “I didn’t do anything special.” When he asks if Taemin has been watching Jonghyun and voting for “Deja-Boo,” Taemin nods, gives him this look like, _duh._ When he asks how Taemin’s been sleeping, Taemin says, “What about you?” and when he asks Taemin if he’s feeling okay, Taemin says, “I should be asking you.” And then suddenly Jonghyun can’t take it anymore.

“Why are you so quiet? Did I keep you up too late, am I tiring you out? Do you want to go home?”

Taemin puts his spoon down.

“Aren’t _you_ tired? Don’t _you_ have to go home?” And Taemin’s eyes are wide, like he really needs Jonghyun listen to him, but this is the first thing he’s said that Jonghyun didn’t have to pry out of him. A couple seconds of eye contact and Taemin softens, and then he’s saying, “Let’s just go back to the dorm, hyung.”

“No, I’ll take you home,” Jonghyun says, and Taemin isn’t giving him any choice, so he gets to his feet.

He’s pretty sure he leaves too much money on the table, but he can’t seem to count right now, and he’s having a hard time looking at things and really seeing them.

Taemin is the exception. When they step out into the night and the moonlight catches in his hair and lines his features in pale silvery light, Jonghyun makes himself look. Makes himself see. He stares and stares, trying to commit Taemin to memory, exactly as he is right now, because if this is the last time he’ll be able to look at Taemin without feeling wrong and dirty and fucked up, he wants to be able to return to this moment, any way he can.

Taemin notices, but acts like he doesn’t, fidgeting with the handle on his door, and Jonghyun takes as long as he can stand before he gets his keys out.

And then it’s dark and lonely and Jonghyun has to concentrate on the road, and he’s not going to look at Taemin again. He grips the steering wheel as tight as he can so that his hands won’t shake, and the silence eats him alive, minute-by-minute. Thirty minutes left, he has to say something. Twenty-five minutes, he has to say something. Twenty-four. Twenty-three.

All of the sudden Taemin asks him, “Are you okay?”

“What?” No good. “Yeah.” Better. “I don’t look okay?”

Jonghyun is already fucking this up. He doesn’t know how to get it right. He doesn’t think he can.

He has to.

“You’re scaring me, you don’t get like this unless it’s something bad,” Taemin says, in a voice Jonghyun has never heard before. “Is it about me? Did I do something wrong?”

“Taemin-ah.”

“What, hyung?”

“I like you.”

“I know,” Taemin says impatiently, like there’s something else coming, something bad like he said, something worse than _that,_ and Jonghyun hates himself so much he feels sick.

“Just listen to me, okay?”

His own voice is strange to him, totally out of his control. The world outside his windshield never changes and there’s no end to it, more and more and more of the same, and now that he’s started this, somehow Jonghyun has to keep going. He can’t stop.

“Okay. So you know, how much I like you, how much I’ve always liked you. Only, it’s not like that anymore. It’s…different.”

Jonghyun doesn’t know where he’s finding these words. He doesn’t know where he’s finding the breath to say them.

“I don’t know when, or how it happened, but it’s been a really long time, and I thought I could handle it on my own, but I think I’ll go crazy if I have to stay like this forever.”

Breathe.

“I’m sorry I can’t, I’m sorry I’m saying these things to you.”

“Hyung, pull over, come on,” Taemin says, and all of the sudden he’s right there, he was always right there, only an inch or two away. 

Jonghyun doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore, doesn’t know where he’s taken them, but he turns his signal on and makes it to the side of the road without hitting anything. When he cuts the engine, cars glide by and streetlight spills in through the windows, but they’re the only two people in the world.

Jonghyun makes a mistake, and lets himself look.

“I’m sorry, Taeminnie,” he says sooner than he thinks he can speak, because that’s important, so important, it’s the first and the last thing. Because, “I can’t go back anymore. I don’t want to. I like you too much.”

Taemin’s eyes fly to Jonghyun’s face, and then he freezes, and that’s all Jonghyun needs to know. That’s all he can take.

“Hyung…”

Jonghyun can’t look, so he puts his head down, holds onto the steering wheel for dear life and grinds his forehead into it, trying not to make any of the sounds clawing him up inside. He thinks he might have lost his mind while he wasn’t looking, while he was so busy trying to keep it together. He just, he wants to take it all back, he wants more time.

“Don’t say anything, Taeminnie,” he chokes out. “Please.”

He wants nothing, and for a minute, he gets it. Then Taemin’s hand lands on the back of his head, fingers sliding through his hair, so small and warm and gentle, and _there._ He doesn’t know what Taemin means, but he’s making it so much worse, he shouldn’t be touching Jonghyun, shouldn’t be making him feel so good and so bad and torturing him like this—

Jonghyun’s feelings grow too violent for his body to hold them. He doesn’t know he’s lifted his head until Taemin yanks his hair, hanging on, and then he’s got Taemin by the back of the neck and he’s pulling him in, and then their mouths are crushed together and neither of them can breathe.

Jonghyun can’t move, eyes squeezed shut so tight it hurts, an eternity in seconds, and then it’s too much, and he needs more. He takes Taemin’s bottom lip between his teeth, gets his tongue inside Taemin’s mouth and fucks in as deep as he can, ragged pained noises rising up his throat. Taemin’s hands are on Jonghyun’s neck, his shoulders, fisted in his shirt, like he doesn’t know where to put them, what to do, and Jonghyun needs to stop, Taemin needs to stop him, this isn’t even a kiss.

Taemin makes a wild sound and presses forward instead, moving his lips clumsily against Jonghyun’s, and when Jonghyun can think again he needs to _see_ , and Taemin does everything he can to keep him, chasing Jonghyun’s tongue with his own and moaning into his mouth, straining to follow Jonghyun until Jonghyun takes his face in his hands, holds him in place, just a breath away.

Jonghyun gulps for air, breaking the string of spit between their mouths. He tries to forget Taemin’s wet pink mouth for a second, just a second, but eye contact is worse, and Jonghyun has to kiss him again. For real, this time, slow and soft and lingering, until Taemin relaxes into him, figures out what to do, then gets bored with Jonghyun and starts trying to make him lose it again. Sticks his tongue in Jonghyun’s mouth, sticks his hands up Jonghyun’s shirt, spreads his fingers over Jonghyun’s skin and pushes him closer, closer, never close enough because the console between their seats is ruining Jonghyun’s life. And he’s so warm and soft and he lets Jonghyun have whatever he wants, lets him pull his hair and bite his neck, leave marks. Presses back into Jonghyun’s hands when Jonghyun traces the curve of Taemin’s spine and slides his fingers under the waistband of Taemin’s sweatpants.

Jonghyun can’t catch up. He doesn’t know how this is happening, doesn’t know how it’s possible that Taemin wants this so badly, that he could want Jonghyun this much. He doesn’t know why this is happening now, he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s been doing for all the time he could have been doing this, but he didn’t know, nothing ever told him he _could._

Mostly, he doesn’t think.

“Taeminnie,” he says into Taemin’s mouth, and he feels Taemin’s smile before he sees it.

“You told me not to talk,” Taemin says.

“Get back here,” Jonghyun demands, but Taemin doesn’t listen, he never listens, and maybe Jonghyun wants to look at him, anyway.

Taemin brushes Jonghyun’s hair out of his eyes, runs his fingertip down Jonghyun’s nose, and Jonghyun’s heart flutters weirdly. “You always try to do everything on your own, you think you know everything.”

“You’re impossible. You let me say all that and you don’t even know what you do to me.”

And then they’re making out again.

Jonghyun has been hard since Taemin first touched him, and he keeps having insane thoughts, taking Taemin to a hotel, getting him naked and spreading him out on white sheets, dragging Taemin into the back seat and having him right here, pushing Taemin’s head down into his lap and coming in his mouth. He almost jumps out of his skin when Taemin just slips his hand down and cups his dick through his pants.

It takes everything he has to pull Taemin away. There’s no time.

“We can’t, Taemin-ah,” Jonghyun tells him, and he wants to laugh, because somehow this is real life, this is really happening. “We can’t do this here and I have work in an hour.”

Taemin gets this look on his face, tongue between his teeth, and tries again. Jonghyun holds onto him this time, laces their fingers together and brushes his lips across Taemin’s knuckles.

“Later, Taeminnie, later.” Taemin doesn’t like that, and he’s so obvious it makes Jonghyun’s blood rush, it makes him want to say all kinds of things. “For tonight…go to bed and think of me and touch yourself, okay? Use me however you want.” Taemin can’t look at him for a moment, and Jonghyun turns his chin gently, steals a kiss. “I’ll be thinking of you all day.”

Taemin nods, bites back a small smile and meets Jonghyun’s eyes for so long that Jonghyun starts to want more.

So he says, “When this is all over, I’m going to take you somewhere and fuck you, and fuck you, until you can’t remember anything else,” and he only does it to see Taemin’s face, but Taemin kisses him quiet, kind of desperate.

By the time they finally get going, it’s nearly dawn, and Jonghyun has to call Manager Hyung and tell him that he’ll meet him at the studio. Then he has to ask him which music show he’s doing today, and then Manager Hyung swears down his ear for five minutes while Taemin sniggers at his elbow and Jonghyun tries to figure out where they are.

He says goodbye to Taemin in the light. He wants to wait until Taemin’s taxi shows up, but when he says as much, Taemin smiles at him so brightly Jonghyun gets dizzy, and then folds Jonghyun into a hug and pats him on the butt and sends him on his way.

Jonghyun isn’t sure when he’ll regain control of his body, hopefully soon. His face is starting to hurt from smiling so much, and for now he’s tucked his boner into his waistband, but that’s not really a long-term solution. In no time at all he’s going to have to change out of his sweats and into skinny pants and dance on TV. 

It’ll be okay, Jonghyun’s nerves will get to him soon enough.

 

They do, and it’s just as bad as it always is, sweating and pacing and freaking out in the waiting room, but Jonghyun has a good feeling this time.

He honestly feels pretty gross, hair greasy and stiff with product, skin too tight and running hot from lack of sleep, but he looks good. He always cleans up well. And all of his own clothes are black, and he likes it that way, but he knows he looks cute in pink, knows his fans will agree with him.

He thinks they like “Deja-Boo,” too. The last few programs he’s done, the people that have showed up for him have begun singing along during his dry run. This morning, too. They don’t have to get up at four a.m. to come here and be a part of this, like he does. They don’t have to learn the words to his song and buy his album and try to understand this new side of Jonghyun. Whether they like _Base_ or they like Shinee or they just like him, no matter what, it’s all the same to Jonghyun. It all means the same thing, that there are people who want to listen to him. He wants to reach them.

And then, today hasn’t even started and it’s already a good day, and nothing he does will change that. Taemin wants him, and he’ll still want him if Jonghyun goes out there and embarrasses himself, if Jonghyun trips over himself and forgets his own lyrics and can’t find his flow. He’d probably still vote for him, too.

But he doesn’t want to fuck up. He wants to show Taemin how cool he is. He’s going to go out there and perform. Do everything perfectly, just the way he’s always seen it in his head. He owes it to Taemin. He owes it to his fans. He owes it to his song. He owes it to himself.

Each time out he gets a little closer to winning. Today is the day, he can feel it.

When the time comes and they take the stage, the dancer hyungs line up behind Jonghyun, half stretching, half joking around, and he leaves them to it. He’s on another planet right now. 

“Loosen up, Jonghyunnie,” one of them says to him. “Try to have fun with it this time.”

And then there’s no more talking. Jonghyun counts his time:

“One, two, three.”

And then the bass kicks in, and Jonghyun does his thing.

 

He wins.

He’d forgotten that Minho was MCing today until he showed up and asked him before they went out to film the encore, “How confident are you?” and normally Jonghyun knows better than to say anything to Minho that’ll make him look stupid later, but he’d said, “I totally won,” and Minho had beamed at him.

And then he stood around and waited and waited and waited, heart fighting up his throat and stomach in free-fall, and watched out for the stupid smile that kept sneaking onto his face. And waited. And waited.

And then.

“Deja-Boo!” 

He forgets his thank you speech halfway through, runs out of people at SM he promised to remember, and says the first thing he can think of. Shinee. Shinee World.

And then Minho is there for a high five and a hug, and then it’s just Jonghyun and his song again, the place where all this began. 

And this is just one moment, and it’s not even over, but he already wants to get here again, wants to feel like this again.

He will.

 

-

 

“What are you working on lately?”

Nine doesn’t usually ask Jonghyun that kind of thing. Jonghyun knows that’s because she usually doesn’t have to, he keeps her updated. He’s been a bad friend lately, though. They haven’t hung out in almost two months.

“A few things,” he says, and then when she doesn't bite he specifies, “Two things.”

“Aigoo, I already asked once, and you want me to ask again,” Nine says, kind of laughing at him. “Fine. What’s the first one?”

“You already know that one. I’m making an album out of my Blue Night compositions,” Jonghyun replies.

“I thought that was just something you wanted to do, I didn’t know it was happening.”

“It’s not,” he admits. “I’m trying to be cool and take it to SM again, but it’s harder this time. There’s no money in this one.”

 _Base_ did well in the end. It was a success for both Jonghyun and SM. He did it, and he gets to do it again, and maybe SM will give him even more freedom next time. That doesn’t explain why Jonghyun is still digging, why he’s found something new that he can’t have, why he wants it so much. Maybe he’s more like Jingi than he thought.

It’s just, The Man Who Composes means a lot to him. It comes from a part of him that he can’t leave behind, even now that everything else is going well. So what if no one cares. So what if no one will buy it.

“They’re a business, Jonghyunnie,” Nine reminds him patiently, and it’s always so weird, the way she always seems to understand and accept the way his world works better than he does. But then, hers works the same way, except there is no money. And no one tells her what to do, really. Nine has been watching his face, and now she says casually, “You know, sometimes I’m really jealous of you. You’re always coming out with new stuff, when we haven’t even produced an album in like three years.”

Jonghyun feels like shit suddenly, he doesn’t know why he always bothers her with his problems like this. Why he never remembers to ask her about hers. When they started getting closer, he went out and bought a copy of all Dear Cloud’s albums, but he doesn’t think he’s ever told her that, either.

“Then I look at your schedule and I get over it. Besides, I like singing live better than recording,” Nine goes on, and his stomach unclenches, because she’s grinning at him. She moves on before he’s ready. “What’s the other one?”

He smiles. “Something for Shinee.”

“You guys are making a comeback?” she asks, lighting up, and he figures she’s okay talking about it.

“Yeah, in a month or two,” he replies, and she nods slowly, like that makes sense.

“Actually, I thought you might be,” she says, teasing him, “No one goes out and bleaches their hair white for no good reason~”

Jonghyun does, but she doesn’t need to know that. He’s going to have to treat it for months, too, and maybe it won’t fit their new concept in the end. Whatever, he likes it, and Taemin likes it. At least he says he does.

“I’m doing a song for our album,” he says. “It’s so hard, though, I’ve never had to think of parts for four people before.”

“Five.”

“I don’t have to think of myself, I know what I want,” Jonghyun says, and that’s true. Dealing with himself is the easy part, for once.

He’s thought of the others non-stop, though, trying to figure out what they do best, what sides of them he wants to show, how to filter their personalities and abilities through his own perspective. Kibum’s English. How far Minho has come from dibidibidi. Taemin’s sweet voice. Jingi’s sense of humor, even. 

He knows how he wants it to sound, he has the melody recorded on his phone and he has a few ideas about how to arrange it. And he has a title, “Odd Eye,” and the hook, and…not a lot else so far. No words, really.

Because there’s the whole other thing, the problem that always returns when he tries to write lyrics for all of them: figuring out how far he can go when their voices are added to his. He's gone too far before, given them words to sing that are only for himself, but this time he wants to find an idea they can all share.

“Nine-ssi,” he says.

“What?”

“SM let us vote on our title song this time,” he tells her.

Nine’s brow wrinkles. “Do they normally pick for you?”

For a minute Jonghyun lets himself be annoyed with her, and at the fact that she’d even have to ask something like that. But he gets over it, the way she did before.

“We picked better for ourselves,” Jonghyun assures her, and he’s pretty sure they did. Even if he wishes they’d had more options, even if he’s already a little scared of taking that kind of responsibility for Shinee’s future. “I’m doing the lyrics for that one, too, there’s something I’ve been working on by myself that fits the song.”

Nine nods, and he wonders if she even remembers what she told him months ago, because he still does. 

_There are ways you can say things with Shinee, too._

When she smiles at him, says, “Good for you, Jonghyun-ah,” he’s sure she didn’t forget, and that she knows how hard he’s trying now. And then that’s it, commercial break’s over, and they’re back to talking to themselves and whoever might be listening.

 

When Jonghyun steps outside, spring greets him. He still misses winter, still dreads summer, but it’s a beautiful night tonight. Even crossing the parking lot at two fifteen in the morning, trying to locate his car and picking his way over puddles from the rain that came and went this earlier in the day, he wants to stop. Look at the moon and the stars, close his eyes and feel the cool air on his face.

Then Taemin finally answers his phone and Jonghyun forgets all that.

“Hyung?”

He sounds sleepy, and Jonghyun tries to feel bad. “Did I wake you?”

“Nope,” Taemin says, and that’s all he says.

“Were you busy?” Jonghyun tries again.

“Uh uh.”

“Taemin-ah, you’re supposed to talk to me,” Jonghyun groans.

Every time they do this, it’s more of the same. He’ll say something, and Taemin will find a way not to answer him. He’s not even doing it on purpose, that’s just how he is. He’s lucky he’s so cute. He’s lucky everything he does is cute, even the things that wind Jonghyun up and the things that make him explode.

Before Taemin can insist that he _is_ talking, Jonghyun has to head him off, say something. Anything. “What are you doing?” And then there’s nothing he doesn’t want to know. “Where are you, what are you wearing?”

Maybe that was too much, because Taemin goes silent for a couple beats. Then he says, “I’m not having phone sex with you, hyung,” and that’s interesting, but Jonghyun is still in the middle of the parking lot.

“Wow, Taeminnie, you have a dirty mind,” he says, and he struggles to shape the words around his smile. “Phone sex? I’m in public right now.”

Taemin gets stuck, and Jonghyun sort of takes mercy on him, says one last thing, “We can discuss it later if you’re still interested,” and then lets him know, “I was just asking because I like being able to see you when I talk to you.”

“So come see me,” Taemin says immediately, surprising Jonghyun.

“Right now?”

“Mm.”

“You’re at home, right, baby?”

The “baby” slips out before Jonghyun knows what he’s saying, and for a minute he teeters, terrified that Taemin is going to hate it.

But Taemin lets him get away with it, replies, “Yeah, I was lazy today,” and Jonghyun wants to slip again. He’s going to slip again. Then Taemin asks, “You aren’t still at work, hyung?”

“No, I just got out.”

And Jonghyun just found his car. Now for his keys.

“And you aren’t tired?”

“No, hyung is really tired,” Jonghyun confesses, and that kind of honesty is still new enough that he has to push himself to get there. It still tastes so sweet, too, still makes his chest go tight, and maybe he wants to hold onto this feeling forever. He wants more. “I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve seen you, though. I’ll come get you, just give me…thirty minutes?”

“Okay, text me,” Taemin says, and doesn’t hang up.

“Okay,” Jonghyun echoes, and he doesn’t hang up either, just sits in his car and strains to hear Taemin breathe in his ear.

“Jonghyun hyung,” Taemin says finally.

The sound of his own name does things to him. “Yeah?”

“I love you,” Taemin says in a rush, and then there’s a click and he’s gone, just like that.

That’s so unfair, Jonghyun never got the chance to say it back. He thinks about calling Taemin back just to say it, _I love you, too,_ and the idea alone makes his heart pound, and he can’t sit still, and he can’t stop smiling, and he’s not even trying to.

Jonghyun starts the car instead.

He’ll say it when he sees Taemin.


End file.
